Back to the future: Australian study finds children are shaped by how their parents were in their youth

PARENTAL influences over children reach back to their teenage years, research shows, long before birth or even conception.

PARENTAL influences over children reach back to their teenage years, research shows.

Long before birth or even conception, the health and lifestyle of future mums and dads has a lasting effect on the next generation.

Australian researchers, including SAHMRI PhD student Peter Azzopardi, analysed data from 195 countries and 144 studies for their paper “Adolescence and the next generation”, published today in the prestigious journal Nature.

Lead author University of Melbourne Professor George Patton said the research showed planning for a healthy baby should start well before the first antenatal visit.

Study lead author Professor George Patton

“We need to be thinking about how we begin intervention well before pregnancy, really back to the adolescent years,” he said.

Professor Patton said “the first thousand days” had been a major focus of policy both here and overseas, but that failed to recognise “many of the risk factors as well as the assets that parents bring to the task of parenting are established before conception, well before pregnancy begins”.

They studied the circumstances surrounding changes in a father’s sperm or a mother’s egg, maternal influences around the time of conception and in later pregnancy, and parenting in the first two years after birth.

“We were looking at those processes where the environment of the parent gets transmitted to the next generation, to affect the health and growth of the next generation,” Professor Patton said.

“So we were looking at things that are modifiable, that you can change.”

Professor Patton said being overweight or obese, stressed or depressed, drinking very heavily, using cannabis or other illicit drugs, could affect the makeup of sperm or eggs.

Drinking heavily, using cannabis or other illicit drugs, being obese are among factors that could affect the makeup of sperm or eggs, the study found.

Certain messages or information could then be passed onto the offspring, reflected in different patterns of early growth and those patterns continued into pregnancy, birth and beyond.

“The teenage years are often where these risk processes begin, but good things happen in the teenage years as well,” Professor Patton said.

“Good health, physical fitness, a healthy lifestyle for parents, these are the kinds of things that lay a foundation for a healthy start to life for the next generation.”

The researchers identified the current generation of 10 to 24-year-olds as the largest yet.

“Providing the resources for healthy adolescent growth, education and emotional development will yield large benefits for current and future generations,” they concluded. .

For more information this study, click here.